Hillbilly America: Do White Lives Matter?

Yesterday I read J.D. Vance’s new book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture In Crisis. Well, “read” is not quite the word. I devoured the thing in a single gulp. If you want to understand America in 2016, Hillbilly Elegy is a must-read. I will be thinking about this book for a long, long time. Here are my impressions.

The book is an autobiographical account by a lawyer (Yale Law School graduate) and sometime conservative writer who grew up in a poor and chaotic Appalachian household. He’s a hillbilly, in other words, and is not ashamed of the term. Vance reflects on his childhood, and how he escaped the miserable fate (broken families, drugs, etc) of so many white working class and poor people around whom he grew up. And he draws conclusions from it, conclusions that may be hard for some people to take. But Vance has earned the right to make those judgments. This was his life. He speaks with authority that has been extremely hard won.

Forgive the rambling nature of this post. I’m still trying to process this extraordinary book.

Vance’s people come from Kentucky and southern Ohio, a deeply depressed region filled with hard-bitten but proud Scots-Irish folks. He begins by talking about how, as a young man, he got a job working in a warehouse, doing hard work for extra money. He writes about how even though the work was physically demanding, the pay wasn’t bad, and it came with benefits. Yet the warehouse struggled to keep people employed. Vance says his book is about macroeconomic trends — outsourcing jobs overseas — but not only that:

But this book is about something else: what goes on in the lives of real people when the industrial economy goes south. It’s about reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible. It’s about a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it. The problems that I saw at the tile warehouse run far deeper than macroeconomic trends and policy. too many young men immune to hard work. Good jobs impossible to fill for any length of time. And a young man [one of Vance’s co-workers] with every reason to work — a wife-to-be to support and a baby on the way — carelessly tossing aside a good job with excellent health insurance. More troublingly, when it was all over, he thought something had been done to him. There is a lack of agency here — a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself. This is distinct from the larger economic landscape of modern America.

This is the heart of Hillbilly Elegy: how hillbilly white culture fails its children, and how the greatest disadvantages it imparts to its youth are the life of violence and chaos in which they are raised, and the closely related problem of a lack of moral agency. Young Vance was on a road to ruin until certain people — including the US Marine Corps — showed him that his choices mattered, and that he had a lot more control over his fate than he thought.

Vance talks about how, in his youth, there was a lot of hardscrabble poverty among his people, but nothing like today, dominated by the devastation of drug addiction. Everything we are accustomed to hearing about black inner city social dysfunction is fully present among these white hillbillies, as Vance documents in great detail. He writes that “hillbillies learn from an early age to deal with uncomfortable truths by avoiding them, or by pretending better truths exist. This tendency might make for psychological resilience, but it also makes it hard for Appalachians to look at themselves honestly.”

This was one of many points at which Vance’s experience converged somewhat with mine. My people are not hillbillies per se, but I come from working-class Southern country white people. Many of the cultural traits Vance describes are present in a more diluted way in my own family. That fierce pride, a pride that would rather see everything go to hell than admit error. This, I think, has something to do with why Southern Protestant Christianity has traditionally been more Stoic than Christian. Real Christianity has as its heart humility. That’s not a characteristic Scots-Irish people hold dear.

Vance talks about the hillbilly habit of stigmatizing people who leave the hollers as “too big for your britches” — meaning that you got above yourself. It doesn’t matter that they may have left to find work, and that they’re living a fairly poor life not too far away, in Ohio. The point is, they left, and that is a hard sin to forgive. What, we weren’t good enough for you?

This is the white-people version of “acting white,” if you follow me: the same stigma and shame that poor black people deploy against other poor black people who want to better themselves with education and so on.

The most important figure in Vance’s life is his Mamaw (pron. “MAM-maw”), Bonnie Vance, a kind of hillbilly Catherine the Great. She was a phenomenally tough woman. She knew how to use a gun, she had a staggeringly foul mouth, she smoked menthols and stood ready to fight at the drop of a hat. And she saved Vance’s life.

Vance plainly loves his people, and because he loves them, he tells hard truths about them. He talks about how cultural fatalism destroys initiative. When hillbillies run up against adversity, they tend to assume that they can’t do anything about it. To the hillbilly mind, people who “make it” are either born to wealth, or were born with uncanny talent, winning the genetic lottery. The connection between self-discipline and hard work, and success, is invisible to them. Vance:

People talk about hard work all the time in places like Middletown [where Vance grew up]. You can walk through a town where 30 percent of the young men work fewer than twenty hours a week and find not a single person aware of his own laziness.

Vance was born into a world of chaos. It takes concentration to follow the trail of family connections. Women give birth out of wedlock, having children by different men. Marriages rarely last, and informal partnerings are more common. Vance has half-siblings by his mom’s different husbands (she has had five to date). In his generation, Vance says, grandparents are often having to raise their grandchildren, because those grandparents, however impoverished and messy their own lives may be, offer a more stable alternative than the incredible instability of the kids’ parents (or more likely, parent).

Vance scarcely knew his biological father until he was a bit older, and lived with his mom and her rotating cast of boyfriends and husbands. Here’s Vance on models of manhood:

I learned little else about what masculinity required of me other than drinking beer and screaming at a woman when she screamed at you. In the end, the only lesson that took was that you can’t depend on people. “I learned that men will disappear at the drop of a hat,” Lindsay [his half-sister] once said. “They don’t care about their kids; they don’t provide; they just disappear, and it’s not that hard to make them go.”

This is what happens in inner-city black culture, as has been exhaustively documented. But these are rural and small-town white people. This dysfunction is not color-based, but cultural.

I could not do justice here to describe the violence, emotional and physical, that characterizes everyday life in Vance’s childhood culture, and the instability in people’s outer lives and inner lives. To read in such detail what life is like as a child formed by communities like that is to gain a sense of why it is so difficult to escape from the malign gravity of that way of life. You can’t imagine that life could be any different.

Religion among the hillbillies is not much help. Vance says that hillbillies love to talk about Jesus, but they don’t go to church, and Christianity doesn’t seem to have much effect at all on their behavior. Vance’s biological father is an exception. He belonged to a strict fundamentalist church, one that helped him beat his alcoholism and gave him the severe structure he needed to keep his life from going off track. Vance:

Dad’s church offered something desperately needed by people like me. For alcoholics, it gave them a community of support and a sense that they weren’t fighting addiction alone. For expectant mothers, it offered a free home with job training and parenting classes. When someone needed a job, church friends could either provide one or make introductions. When Dad faced financial troubles, his church banded together and purchased a used car for the family. In the broken world I saw around me — and for the people struggling in that world — religion offered tangible assistance to keep the faithful on track.

Vance says the best thing about life in his dad’s house was how boring it was. It was predictable. It was a respite from the constant chaos.

On the other hand, the religion most hillbillies espouse is a rusticated form of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. God seems to exist only as a guarantor of ultimate order, and ultimate justice; Jesus is there to assuage one’s pain. Except for those who commit to churchgoing — and believe it or not, this is one of the least churched parts of the US — Christianity is a ghost.

About Vance’s father’s fundamentalism, I got more details about what this blog’s reader Turmarion, who lives in Appalachia, keeps telling me about that region’s fundamentalism. Even though I live in the rural Deep South, this form of Christianity is alien to me. When he went to live with his dad for a time as an adolescent (if I have my chronology correct), Vance was exposed for the first time to church. He appreciated very much the structure, but noticed that the spirituality on offer was fear-based and paranoid. “[T]he deeper I immersed myself in evangelical theology, the more I felt compelled to mistrust many sectors of society. Evolution and the Big Bang became ideologies to confront, not theories to understand … In my new church … I heard more about the gay lobby and the war on Christmas than about any particular character trait that a Christian should aspire to have.”

This was yet another reminder of why so many Evangelicals react strongly against the Benedict Option. As I often say, I have no experience of this extreme siege mentality in Christianity. In fact, my experience is entirely the opposite. I believe that some Christians coming out of fundamentalism may react so strongly against their miserable, unhappy background that they don’t appreciate the extent to which there really are people and forces out to “get” them. When you have lived almost all your Christian life among highly assimilated Christians who generally don’t pay attention to these things, their complacency can drive you crazy. But Vance helps me to understand how someone who grew up in its opposite would find even the slightest hint of siege Christianity to be anathema.

One of the most important contributions Vance makes to our understanding of American poverty is how little public policy can affect the cultural habits that keep people poor. He talks about education policy, saying that the elite discussion of how to help schools focuses entirely on reforming institutions. “As a teacher at my old high school told me recently, ‘They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.”

He continues:

Why didn’t our neighbor leave that abusive man? Why did she spend her money on drugs? Why couldn’t she see that her behavior was destroying her daughter? Why were all of these things happening not just to our neighbor but to my mom? It would be years before I learned that no single book, or expert, or field could fully explain the problems of hillbillies in modern America. Our elegy is a sociological one, yes, but it is also about psychology and community and culture and faith. During my junior year of high school, our neighbor Pattie called her landlord to report a leaky roof. The landlord arrived and found Pattie topless, stoned, and unconscious on her living room couch. Upstairs the bathtub was overflowing — hence, the leaking roof. Pattie had apparently drawn herself a bath, taken a few prescription painkillers, and passed out. The top floor of her home and many of her family’s possessions were ruined. This is the reality of our community. It’s about a naked druggie destroying what little of value exists in her life. It’s about children who lose their toys and clothes to a mother’s addiction.

This was my world: a world of truly irrational behavior. We spend our way into the poorhouse. We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high-interest credit cards and payday loans. We purchase homes we don’t need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake. Thrift is inimical to our being. We spend to pretend that we’re upper class. And when the dust clears — when bankruptcy hits or a family member bails us out of our stupidity — there’s nothing left over. Nothing for the kids’ college tuition, no investment to grow our wealth, no rainy-day fund if someone loses her job. We know we shouldn’t spend like this. Sometimes we beat ourselves up over it, but we do it anyway.

More:

Our homes are a chaotic mess. We scream and yell at each other like we’re spectators at a football game. At least one member of the family uses drugs — sometimes the father, sometimes both. At especially stressful times, we’ll hit and punch each other, all in front of the rest of the family, including young children; much of the time, the neighbors hear what’s happening. A bad day is when the neighbors call the police to stop the drama. Our kids go to foster care but never stay for long. We apologize to our kids. The kids believe we’re really sorry, and we are. But then we act just as mean a few days later.

And on and on. Vance says his people lie to themselves about the reality of their condition, and their own personal responsibility for their degradation. He says that not all working-class white hillbillies are like this. There are those who work hard, stay faithful, and are self-reliant — people like Mamaw and Papaw. Their kids stand a good chance of making it; in fact, Vance says friends of his who grew up like this are doing pretty well for themselves. Unfortunately, most of the people in Vance’s neighborhood were like his mom: “consumerist, isolated, angry, distrustful.”

As I said earlier, the two things that saved Vance were going to live full time with his Mamaw (therefore getting out of the insanity of his mom’s home), and later, going into the US Marine Corps. I’ve already written at too much length about Vance’s story, so I won’t belabor this much longer. Suffice it to say that as imperfect as she was, Mamaw gave young Vance the stability he needed to start succeeding in school. And she wouldn’t let him slack off on his studies. She taught him the value of hard work, and of moral agency.

The Marine Corps remade J.D. Vance. It pulverized his inner hillbilly fatalism, and gave him a sense that he had control over his life, and that his choices mattered. This was news to him. Reading this was a revelation to me. I was raised by parents who grew up poor, but who taught my sister and me from the very start that we were responsible for ourselves. Hard work, self-respect, and self-discipline were at the core of my dad’s ethic, for sure. There was no more despicable person in my dad’s way of seeing the world than the sumbitch who won’t work. I doubt that I’ve ever known a man more willing to do hard physical labor than my father was. Knowing what he came from, and knowing how any progress he made came from the sweat of his brow and self-discipline on spending, he had no tolerance for people who were lazy and blamed everybody else for their problems. This is true whether they were poor, middle class, or rich (but especially if they were rich).

Anyway, Vance talks about how the contemporary hillbilly mindset renders them unfit for participation in life outside their own ghetto. They don’t trust anybody, and are willing to believe outlandish conspiracy theories, particularly if those theories absolve them from responsibility.

I once ran into an old acquaintance at a Middletown bar who told me that he had recently quit his job because he was sick of waking up early I later saw him complaining on Facebook about the “Obama economy” and how it had affected his life. I don’t doubt that the Obama economy has affected many, but this man is assuredly not among them. His status in life is directly attributable to the choices he’s made, and his life will improve only through better decisions. But for him to make better choices, he needs to live in an environment that forces him to ask tough questions about himself. There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day.

Hence the enormous popularity of Donald Trump among the white working class. Here’s a guy who will believe and say anything, and who blames Mexicans, Chinese, and Muslims for America’s problems. The elites hate him, so he’s made the right enemies, as far as the white working class is concerned. And his “Make America Great Again” slogan speaks to the deep patriotism that Vance says is virtually a religion among hillbillies.

Trump doesn’t come up in Vance’s narrative, but in truth, he’s all over it. Vance is telling his personal story, not analyzing US politics and culture broadly. It’s also true, however, that the GOP elites set themselves up for their current disaster, by listening to theories that absolved themselves of any responsibility for problems in this country from immigration and free trade (Trump is not all wrong about this).

The sense of inner order and discipline Vance learned in the Marine Corps allowed his natural intelligence to blossom. The poor hillbilly kid with the druggie mom ends up at Yale Law School. He says he felt like an outsider there, but it was a serious education in more than the law:

The wealthy and the powerful aren’t just wealthy and powerful; they follow a different set of norms and mores. … It was at this meal, on the first of five grueling days of [law school job] interviews, that I began to understand that I was seeing the inner workings of a system that lay hidden to most of my kind. … That week of interviews showed me that successful people are playing an entirely different game.

What he’s talking about is social capital, and how critically important it is to success. Poor white kids don’t have it (neither do poor black or Hispanic kids). You’re never going to teach a kid from the trailer park or the housing project the secrets of the upper middle class, but you can give them what kids like me had: a basic understanding of work, discipline, confidence, good manners, and an eagerness to learn. A big part of the problem for his people, says Vance, is the shocking degree of family instability among the American poor. “Chaos begets chaos. Instability begets instability. Welcome to family life for the American hillbilly.”

Vance is admirably humble about how the only reason he got out was because key people along the way helped him climb out of the hole his culture dug for him. When Vance talks about how to fix these problems, he strikes a strong skeptical note. The worst problems of his culture, the things that held kids like him back, are not things a government program can fix. For example, as a child, his culture taught him that doing well in school made you a “sissy.” Vance says the home is the source of the worst of these problems. There simply is not a policy fix for families and family systems that have collapsed.

I believe we hillbillies are the toughest goddamned people on this earth. … But are we tough enough to do what needs to be done to help a kid like Brian? Are we tough enough to build a church that forces kids like me to engage with the world rather than withdraw from it? Are we tough enough to look ourselves in the mirror and admit that our conduct harms our children? Public policy can help, but there is no government that can fix these problems for us. These problems were not created by governments or corporations or anyone else. We created them, and only we can fix them.

Voting for Trump is not going to fix these problems. For the black community, protesting against police brutality on the streets is not going to fix their most pressing problems. It’s not that the problems Trump points to aren’t real, and it’s not that police brutality, especially towards minorities, isn’t a problem. It’s that these serve as distractions from the core realities that keep poor white and black people down. A missionary to inner-city Dallas once told me that the greatest obstacle the black and Latino kids he helped out had was their rock-solid conviction that nothing could change for them, and that people who succeeded got that way because they were born white, or rich, or just got lucky.

Until these things are honestly and effectively addressed by families, communities, and their institutions, nothing will change.

Is there a black J.D. Vance? I wonder. I mean, I know there are African-Americans who have done what he has done. But are there any who will write about it? Clarence Thomas did, in his autobiography. Who else? Anybody know?

It is immoral because it perpetuates a lie: that the white working class that finds itself attracted to Trump has been victimized by outside forces. It hasn’t. The white middle class may like the idea of Trump as a giant pulsing humanoid middle finger held up in the face of the Cathedral, they may sing hymns to Trump the destroyer and whisper darkly about “globalists” and — odious, stupid term — “the Establishment,” but nobody did this to them. They failed themselves.

If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that. Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down. The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die.

Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.

I criticized Williamson at the time for his harshness. I still wouldn’t have put it the way he did, but reading Vance gives me reason to reconsider my earlier judgment. Vance writes from a much more loving and appreciative place than Williamson did (though I believe Williamson came from a similar rough background), but he affirms many of the same truths. If white lives matter — and they do, because all lives matter — then sentimentality and more government programs aren’t going to rescue these poor people. Vance puts it more delicately than Williamson, but getting a U-Haul and getting away from other poor people — or at least finding some way to get their kids out of there, to a place where people aren’t so fatalistic, lazy, and paranoid — is their best hope. And that is surely true no matter what your race.

The book is called Hillbilly Elegy, and I can’t recommend it to you strongly enough. It offers no easy answers. But it does tell the truth. I thank reader Surly Temple for giving it to me.

UPDATE: Hello Browser readers. Glad to see traffic from one of my favorite websites. If you found this piece interesting, I strongly encourage you to take a look at the subsequent interview I did with J.D. Vance about the book. I posted it last Friday, and it has gone viral. This past weekend was a record-setting one for TAC; Vance’s interview was so popular it crashed our server. Take a look at the piece and you’ll understand why. This extraordinary young writer is tapping into something very, very deep in American life right now. I’ve been getting plenty of e-mails from liberals saying how much they appreciated the piece, because Vance tells difficult truths that both liberals and conservatives need to hear.

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193 Responses to Hillbilly America: Do White Lives Matter?

Unfortunately, MacCauley’s research on stereotypes finds them to be accurate

That’s shallow. Name any stereotype, conservative, liberal, moderate (whatever that is), racist, abolitionist, technocratic… and I can find you one or more individuals who fit that stereotype… as well as quite a few who do not, many of whom do fit one of the other stereotypes.

The root problem is expecting people to all fit neatly into the grand bundle of stereotypes for their particular demographic, when a fair number of individuals in ANY demographic will be chomping at the bit to get out.’

Don’t forget that a lot of African Americans have a good deal of Scotch-Irish blood in them, for several different reasons.

A good thing to remember for future discussions: Panda is right about Ashkenazi Jews being considered the cretins of European culture. Even H. G. Wells, who knew better, could not help comparing someone of marginal intelligence to a “Polish Jew.” The implication was that assimilated German Jews were quite all right (a proposition Hitler didn’t buy.) When some of these Jews from Russia via Poland reached England, anti-semitism among the knowing took a decided upswing.

Of course, most of the New York “Jewish Intellectual class” came from these “dregs.” BTW, the Irish–particularly those starving during the Famine–were considered similarly challenged. Contemporary print and graphic evidence for these assertions abounds.

The Australian indigenous population is better compared to that of Native Americans than African-Americans.

Our 457 Visa program has offshored or imported most of our IT jobs, so even people educated in STEM are often unemployed long term. I have 30+ years experience and can work with any modern technologies and know I have reached the 50 mark and if sacked will spend months if not years trying to find an entry-level position.

It isn’t only working class jobs – Doctors, IT workers, Scientists, Lawyers and more are finding that instead of being respected professionals they are now wage slaves easily replaced by offshore or imported people or automation.

The sense that our system isn’t working for us was reflected in our recent elections and the popularity of minor parties, independents and such. Our leader is a lame duck without a mandate or the numbers in the Senate to do much of anything.

As one blog here said, forget Brexit, we Aussies REALLY know how to elect a dysfunctional government for the long haul.

Yes, we have enthusiastically embraced multiculturalism among our elites. But we are uniquely placed in the world – and I mean this geographically. We are a long way away from most everybody else and have an ocean or two between us and the rest of the world.

Governments won power by “Stopping the Boats”, meaning creating illegal (see PNG Supreme Court decision) or semi-legal detention centres in small island countries.

Yet we have a massive illegal immigration problem the media won’t touch, and arrests almost daily for incitement by radical clerics of Islam. Our Lebanese population went from being a model of multicultural success to the most notorious immigrant group once Islam was encouraged.

These days, lots of Somalis – and every one I talk to asks why we are letting so many really bad Somalis into the country – Iraqis, Iranians, Afghans as well as 457 Visa workers from Malaysia, Bangladesh and the like.

For the record, I worked for decades in Immigration (I think I helped implement the 457 Visas which ruined my life) and my father is currently an inspector of the offshore detention facilities, who interviews refugees and detention centre workers regularly.

We already have our Wall – Oceans, a Navy, our new Border Force, offshore detention centres – and immigrants, legal and illegal, fly right over it.

Well I don’t know this fellow’s Appalachia. I live here in Appalachia. I’m not leaving. I will get the book and read it but I can tell right now it’s going to get my dander up. I know some people, very few, that has some of the same family experience as his. BUT his experience, as tragic as it is, is definitely not ALL of the Appalachian people’s experience. My family are from here, I’m 11th generation. We have people in dire straits with drug problems it’s true, but we also know part of that problem was we’ve had drug companies dump drugs here. A justice department report that showed how it was accomplished. Offering doctor’s and clinics cash incentives to distribute oxy for a hang nail! One of the most addictive drugs ever that should have never been prescribed as it was. Blaming our problems on our culture? More of a class war than a culture one even among our own people would be more accurate. A U-Haul is the answer? SIGH!!! As usual the stereotype hits us again. Should we take the worst drug addicted uneducated people in your town and say that represents everyone there including yourself? Not to mention taking pictures of the worst of Appalachia what I call “poverty porn”. It’s the same as taking pictures of poverty anywhere in the world and saying that represents an entire town or region or state! It’s a false view and not the truth. Much more complicated than that.

It’s not strictly comparable because they make up 3% of the population rather than 12%, but the plight of Aborigines in Australia is much, much, much worse than that of Black people in America. (In terms of crime, educational outcomes, substance abuse, unemployment, poverty and much, much worse that I prefer not to even think about).

The correct comparison in that case is to Native Americans and Canadians; Moaris are in a little better situation,as are the aborigines here in Taiwan. My wife’s people: like Maoris they are Austronesian; they have problems with alcohol, crime (though mostly fighting and domestic violence) lower education etc.

Certainly part of it is cultural. During the great boom here twenty years ago, most of the construction work was done by aborigines, and it was easily available. I knew one labour contractor, an aborigine himself, who used to despair over keeping workers. After a few months, with cash in their pocket, they’d up and head home for fishing or hunting season, and only show up again a couple of months later when they were out of cash.

OTOH, they seemed a lot happier than the Han Chinese caught in the rat race. (They are also mostly Christian, as opposed to the Taiwanese who are Buddhist/Taoist.)

I was actually in Canberra for a conference in April, and I have to say, I loved your country. I think there are lots to be said for the merits of the tough immigration policy that Australia had in the past. Interestingly enough, as I’m sure ROD will be interested to hear, when I was there the papers were full of chatter about how the upcoming election would affect gay marriage.

I don’t think the Australian Aborigines are really comparable either to Native Americans or to African Americans: for a start, they’re much more miserable and dysfunctional than either one. I’m not really saying this as a criticism of Australia here. For a start, the technological and cultural level of Australian Aborigines *before European contact* was much lower than that of either most African or most New World cultures, and much of the problems of Aboriginal communities today (in my understanding) seems to be self inflicted, which I don’t think is the case in America.

If you read Anti-Semitic tracts from late 19th to early 20th century, you will see that the Anti-Semites blamed Jews, who were “swindlers” and not more intelligent just “crafty” for the fact that they were more successful and prominent in Austro-Hungary. Because Jews were disproportionately represented in the elite, these accusations were highly effective in mobilizing the masses.

If you read far Left writings, you will see that “Jewish Privilege” is now “White Privilege” and the “International Jewish Conspiracy” is now “White Supremacy” or the “Patriarchy”.

The political benefit of scapegoating a minority over a majority is, of course, in a democracy, you can win elections by telling the majority they are exploited by some successful minority, whereas the opposite is false.

With the importation of a much more Anti-Semitic population than the natives, combined with secular economic stagnation and decline for average workers, with the pumped primed by “White Privilege” (even though many white ethnicities show pervasive intergenerational low status), you have a wonderful background for a full-scale revival of Anti-Semitism on the Left, who as you know are the good guys who can do no wrong.

I came from similar past, in the North Wisconsin woods. It was during WWII, we faced much hardship. A mother with 4 small children, a father off to war (who never returned) a meager income, the fathers pay was less then what we scraped from our small farm. Many “White” Americans and many of my American Indian neighbors face hardship & prejudice daily, but we dreamed of a better tomorrow. We worked hard to over come each hurdle and most of us succeeded. Some went on to achieve great heights, most of us achieved a better life than our parents. The American Dream is in reach of anyone who reaches for it and is willing to work hard. America provides an equal opportunity for all (who are prepared and willing to work hard) it doesn’t provide equal outcome, what one achieves is the result of ones ability, determination and hard work. People of ALL races have reached their dream.

The root problem is expecting people to all fit neatly into the grand bundle of stereotypes for their particular demographic, when a fair number of individuals in ANY demographic will be chomping at the bit to get out.’
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There may be a reoccurring theme in certain groups of people & cultures, but I think stereotypes are more often projections of prejudice or a lazy way to get a handle on something outside our experience.
Someone here commented about “poverty porn.” That’s a good observation.
I don’t know much about Ohio & wouldn’t question Mr. Vance’s personal experiences there. Maybe things are as grim overall as he states, but that’s not what I’ve experienced below the Mason Dixon line. And even though I understand genetics plays a part in health & addiction issues & the Scotch Irish may very well have some inherited tendencies towards that, I’ve seen the very same troubles in any number of other folks in the South.
Approximately a quarter of a million Scotch Irish settled here in the 1700’s. In the Appalachian region they intermarried quite a bit with Germans. Look at the last names in a West VA, Western NC or Western VA phone book. If you look at Appalachian food you’ll see much German influence. I don’t think the German or Pennsylvania Dutch stereotype is of a trashy folk who’d rather fight & drink than work.
DNA & local culture are important, but we have to be careful not to turn it into some kind of modern day eugenic explanation for problems we can’t solve.

My only question after reading this is whether these dysfunctional societies suffer from the mass incarceration epidemic that the war on drugs have inflicted on urban areas? There was no mention of that, and I am truly curious.

I have thought a lot about this, seeing as I am on the edge of the deep south and appalachia and genetically hail from both. I think it comes down to what people are willing to put up with. In regards to gainful work, people will put up with having a boss(think immediate supervisor) or having low pay, but not both. Everyone has varying degrees to which they will deal with this.

If your region has lost a major industrial driver and self employment is bleak and jobs are a hassle and don’t pay well, why not just live off government assistance? But you say “just move!” Consider, if myself or many of your readers were to move in order to take a new job if would in most cases only pay a small amount more, maybe $5,000. After taxes, pension, insurance that’s only 300-350 a month increase. $300 a month just to live farther from family, in an unknown situation, any emergency, additional day care, travel to home and that pay increase is gone. If i didn’t have a job I would move but not for a small raise.

Here in the US, we laud the CEO and sneer at the janitor, even if the CEO is leading the company to ruin and the janitor is doing a fantastic job of keeping the place clean.

Why do I think that it happens not *just* in the US, but in every other country of Europe and both Americas + Australia and New Zealand as well, no matter whether their political tradition is predominantly right or left? Not to mention the Middle East, where a successful merchant is equal to a king, while other people are not worth even the dirt on his shoes.

Mr Dreher,
I read this article a few days ago and it greatly disturbed me, while I applaud Mr Vance on his success, I do take issue with some of his conclusions. I am a health care professional with a Master’s degree and a lifetime of experience in that field. While I can not speak about the Appalachian experience, I grew up in Upstate NY and have spent considerable time in rural Ontario. The devastation of the white working class in those areas is grim, grinding, and ongoing. There are few if any alternatives for these people and many do not have the resources to relocate. However, the tendency to blame these populations for sinking into despair, drug addiction, and dysfunctional families is simply cruel and unfair. The government is directly implicated in the devastation of these areas with policies like NAFTA, pro-corporate policies that allow off shoring of jobs without penalty, and pro big Pharma policies that produce huge profits at the expense of workers and patients. All while destroying the social supports these folks paid into with payroll taxes all of their working lives.

An interesting article addressing these problems was written by James Petras and Robin Eastman-Abaya MD called- Genocide by Prescription ” The Natural History”of the Declining White Working Class in America. Many of the things these authors discussed resonated as true in my personal and professional experience. I hope the above cited article will bring about a better understanding of the prevailing and ongoing conditions for people abandoned by their government and capitalism. Thank you for your thoughtful articles.

“The military has a long history of providing stability and and structure to young men, often with with some directly transferable job skills, and then returning them back to the larger society.”

Not working out so well for the larger society, like the soldier who was the BLM demonstration police assassin. Nor in the heavily militarized police who give first preference to recruiting ex-soldiers.

Look at the American Sniper. A pathology as heroism. Then he’s murdered by one of the returned veterans he was “helping.”

KD, thank you for providing a source reference. I have downloaded the pdf and will continue to look at it as I have time. My first impressions from skimming 20 pages or so:

This is a meta-study of various other studies, a conclusion built on a set of suppositions. No doubt the arithmetic is sound, but that says nothing about how well any or each or all of the underlying studies managed to measure what they tried to measure, or how they defined what they were trying to measure. Settled science your correlation coefficient is not.

I work in the lower levels of social science, where the rubber meets the road, the live human subject is presented with a framework of questions. I know how earnest the learned professors are about their little segments of various studies, but aside from some cold hard economic data (which still relies on how well an individual remembers and how truthful is their answer), I have come to increasingly see the conclusions as a lot of dubious froth, and the questions as so abstract from people’s actual lives as to represent nothing.

Social science of this kind is very abstract, and while it sounds awfully authoritative, its very hard to know if there is any substance behind the manipulations. Not surprisingly, such studies are avidly cites by those who find their conclusions accord with pre-existing suppositions.

“This was my world: a world of truly irrational behavior. We spend our way into the poorhouse. We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high-interest credit cards and payday loans. We purchase homes we don’t need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake. Thrift is inimical to our being. We spend to pretend that we’re upper class. And when the dust clears — when bankruptcy hits or a family member bails us out of our stupidity — there’s nothing left over. Nothing for the kids’ college tuition, no investment to grow our wealth, no rainy-day fund if someone loses her job. We know we shouldn’t spend like this. Sometimes we beat ourselves up over it, but we do it anyway.”
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You know, this is exactly what I used to hear about Section 8 tenants when I worked for a realty company. And also for the low income, first time home buyers when they were giving away mortgages to anyone who had a pulse. At most every eviction there’d be a huge wide screen tv & a king size bed from the Rent-A-Center to repossess.
The fact was that during the housing crash we found out pretty much everyone was living this way-right on the edge financially.
Big, pretentious homes would be foreclosed along with the little cheap houses. Folks would grab a suitcase & leave everything behind. Even their dogs to starve in the backyard.
Living on credit, overspending, accumulating debt & not planning for the future is something the poor get caught at more often because they have less of a cushion. But trust me, it’s a part of human nature & when things fall apart you see this in all economic levels.

Any analogy will be faulty regarding distant and unconnected lands and their indigenous populations – I was just making the point that Aborigines were not transported in chains to Australia.

My Irish forebears were. We were established as a convict dump after America’s independence. Sentences were 7 years, 14 years or life. I’ve heard modern folk talking about refugees while claiming that Australians were all “boat people.”

Dragging Irish and Cockney rebels and criminals in irons across the world to starve or disappear is hardly comparable to modern refugee circumstances with folk piling on to get here and into our welfare system.

As ever, the proposed plebiscite on gay marriage is opposed by the advocates, who fear that when put to a vote won’t get over the line. It should be legislated in parliament without the public having input.

As ever, it is framed as being about personal rights and opposition to bullying while never mentioning the Gender Fluidity education and regulation that are now welded onto GQLTB (why L always gets priority is pure sexism!) issues and the totalitarian approach to every word spoken and/or written forever more, along with the re-writing of Herstory.

It is inevitable, and we as a culture gave up on religion except as multicultural ammunition long ago, although in my own lifetime.

I was also raised in the Hillbilly life via KY and TN and it’s not a stretch to say life is tough as hell. I left and did a 20 years stint in the USAF and I’m doing well as a Hobby Gunsmith and Stock Investor. This is why when we, people raised this way hear about this so-called “White Privilege” we scratch our heads and wonder what the Hell they are talking about. When we hear Racism, we also have to wonder when we go to Town and the Town people see us and look at us like we are some Aliens that are out to steal or when the local Cops see us the first thing they do is follow us or watch us like a bunch of Hawks, yes we get treated the same way as Blacks in many areas do, but we also act like they do in many places, We are combatant against Cops, we have a perceived persecution complex that is both real and unreal and we get stupid about it and end up sitting in a cell someplace.
Now I have to be honest, living as a Hillbilly was not always this way, at one time we were some of the hardest working people in the country and many of us migrated to Ohio and into Detroit where we found a better life in industry but industry left and we are right back were we started, except deeper in a hole. we are back to the old pre-Civil War stereo types that had gone away to again being thought of as stupid, racist, and every vile thing you can imagine, even though we live among people of Color, yes little known fact, many black people live among us and inter marry and this fact seems to be an unknown to many city folks, in fact I see more racial harmony in the Hills on TN than I have ever saw in the Cities.
I have rambled long enough and I have to say the major destruction of the Hillbilly family is indeed Drugs, this is something pretty new to us and basically became a core problem in the last 30 years. How did this happen ?. It started with good intentions, volunteers used to come up and provide medical services to us and were pretty free with giving out Drugs thinking they were helping us, but in the end it spread like a Wildfire and many ended up hooked and it. It became an escape from being poor, which made us more poor because we were less motivated to work and the Cycle continues to this day and I pray someday we will break this cycle.

Working Dad,
You pointed out something else people seem to forget, When you succeed you tend to move were business is conducted, but you end up just as broke, why ?, for example I live in Denver and every time I make more money, everything ends up costing more money, a run down home that is unfit to live in cost more than a Mansion in the Hills, food prices are crazy and back stabbing is the Norm in a Liberal City and just watching how people treat each other in liberal cities is enough to make your skin crawl.

Re: Stereotypes are generally true, with a correlation coefficient of .6.

Stereotypes are like caricatures in art. Certainly there’s an obvious resemblance, but there’s also gross distortion. But anyway, the problem (both practically and morally) comes from judging individuals by reference to a stereotype. It’s just not a valid way of thinking.

… We were established as a convict dump after America’s independence.”
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Because America was no longer available as a dumping ground for British convicts.
Per Samuel Johnson on Americans:”Sir, they are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging.”
Boswell: Life

I didn’t understand until recently that many who immigrated here as indentured servants were actually convicts whose indenture had been sold to the highest bidder:

“Transported convicts, both men and women, were sold to plantation owners as another form of labor. One-fourth of the British immigrants to the colonies were convicts. Most of these convicts were male, young, unskilled, and poor. The usual crime was grand larceny. Generally, the only people exiled were those judges felt could be rehabilitated. Convicts performed the same type of work as indentured servants but were less trusted. Their length of service was usually longer than that of indentured servants. Like indentured servants and slaves, convicts frequently ran away. Political prisoners also were shipped to the colonies. Most of these were convicted following religious persecutions.”

Just to mention, in reading about early Scotch Irish immigrants it was noted that they often came to the American colonies together in families & paid their own fare. This was a bit unusual since so many came from that part of the world under less ideal circumstances. An example:

“Stonewall Jackson was descended from John Jackson (born ca. 1716 in Ireland; moved to London age 10; d. 1801) and Elizabeth Cummins (b. ca. 1719, London, England; d. 1825). Both were convicted of theft in 1749 in London’s Old Bailey court, and were sentenced to seven-year indentures “to some of his Majesty’s colonies and Plantations in America.” The couple met on board the prison ship Litchfield which departed London in May 1749, and originally settled in Maryland. Both were able to complete their indentures early and they married in 1755. Shortly after the birth of their first child they left Maryland to become pioneers in the area that is now northwestern West Virginia… ”http://www.vmi.edu/archives/stonewall-jackson-resources/jackson-family-genealogy/

Someone above mentioned Winter’s Bone — I’d second that recommendation as an excellent fictional representation of what’s being discussed here (the movie is very good indeed, but the novel is better.)

I’d also recommend the short stories of the West Virginia writer Breece D’J Pancake, who died by suicide in 1979. His stories, written from the “inside,” communicate that the desperate emptiness of current Southern rural culture was already well established by the 70s.

I’m going to outwear my welcome here, but I saw this news item. The opiod drug issue seems to be everywhere:
“Coroner: New Orleans overdose deaths outpacing homicides”
NEW ORLEANS (AP) – New Orleans officials say they’ve seen a sharp increase in the number of overdose deaths involving opioids in the city this year.

Orleans Parish Coroner Dr. Jeffrey Rouse tells The Times-Picayune (http://bit.ly/29y1TS7) that there were 65 opioid deaths in New Orleans in 2016 as of May 31. That’s compared to 47 homicides over the same period.

Rouse says fatal overdoses from heroin and fentanyl account for the growing toll. Opioid deaths from the first five months of this year have already outpaced the count for all of 2015, when 63 deaths were attributed to opioid overdoses…”

Re: Watching how people treat each other in liberal cities is enough to make your skin crawl.

Either Denver is a horrible city or you know some really horrible people. I live in Baltimore, a very blue city and no stranger to troubles. Yet my friends here are among the best I have ever had. A while back I was pressured to move out of town to the far exurbs and I flatly refused to do so mainly because I treasure my friends and my church here. My advice is to find a better crowd to hang with.

Second, while both the persistence and importance) of cultures (such as the Scots-Irish, AKA Ulster Presbyterian), are often under-rated, culture by itself can explain too much.

While the bulk of the 18th century Scots-Irish diaspora was to the American frontier, there was a significant migration to Canada as well, and their descendants seem to have done a lot better than those who moved to Appalachia. And, of course, most Scots-Irish never left Ulster, where they also did very well economically; Northern Ireland was by far the most prosperous and industrialized part of Ireland until at least after World World II.

I suspect the interaction between culture and place matters at least as much as culture by itself. The American frontier in the 18th century was the same kind of Marcher land that the Scots-Irish culture was formed in; poor farming country, very little commerce (and the resulting urban development), and constant low-level warfare. Those would all reinforce the aspects of Scots-Irish culture that prove so problematic to those who stayed in the ghettos of Appalachia. The portrayal of that culture in “Albion’s Seed” sounds a lot like how many “mountain people” cultures are perceived all over the world, in fact.

The novelist Daniel Woodrell explores some of these issues in his works, most notable “Winter’s Bone”: an even better book than it was a movie. The portrayal of a smart, resourceful and courageous young woman who was still likely to be trapped in poverty is very moving.

I would have to disagree about it being a “Scoth-Irish” appalachy problem. To fight poverty, the government regulated family from the 1970’s and with it we have seen father absent families rise from 5% to over 50%. This is the cause of the lack of work ethic and personal responsibility. And it is “uppity” to say that your college degree and 6figure salary and golf club membership is better than my plumbers license and beers with the boys on poker night and weekend hunting trips. Let’s not forget the American Scots were a big part of building this Republic which allows the pursuit of happiness as I see it, not as others see it for me.

DNA & local culture are important, but we have to be careful not to turn it into some kind of modern day eugenic explanation for problems we can’t solve.

Three cheers for Mrs. Cracker!!!

I didn’t understand until recently that many who immigrated here as indentured servants were actually convicts whose indenture had been sold to the highest bidder

Actually, the paradigm for slavery of Africans in North America was the treatment of indentured servants from England. There was even a period of overlap, and an even longer period of inter-marriage, but eventually, what used to be the intended fate of the indentured convict became the presumed function of the African.

ralize that I’m not going to change any minds writing a comment on the Internet, but this idea is one of the underlying causes of our social dysfunction. I don’t mean to pick on Hector; this is a common refrain. But the idea that anyone deserves anything…

With all due respect, my views are quite the contrary (and since you don’t actually provide evidence for any of your claims, I suspect this is going to come down to a battle of competing and incompatible moral intuitions). I think one of the major causes of social dysfunction (not just in our society, but throughout history) is quite the opposite: it’s the tendency to accept the social and economic order as ‘given’, and inherently ‘good’ (or at the very least, better than most probably alternatives), and to accept an unjust social order rather than trying to change it. (I think this is part of what underlies the difference between the conservative and revolutionary mindset, and I also think it’s not unrelated to the debate between orthodox Christianity and the Gnostics about whether nature and the created world are inherently good or not. Vogelin probably wasn’t entirely wrong to see a link between Gnosticism and Communism, just as there’s a link on the other end between religious orthodoxy and politico-economic conservatism).

I would say, yes, absolutely, to the extent that societal resources and the prevailing level of technology permit, everyone in society who is willing to contribute labour hours, deserves a reasonably comfortable standard of living. Those who choose not to contribute to society deserve fewer and more basic economic and social rights, but I suspect these are few and far between: most people (outside a few dysfunctional subcultures) don’t really want to be unemployed or underemployed. The people described in the Vance book are underemployed because the factories and mines went away. Society owes it to them (and to people in similar situations all over the world) either to bring those jobs back or to find them alternative employment.

Economic inequality, shifts towards automation, underemployment and so forth aren’t facts of nature. They exist because human societies made particular choices. We could have, and ought to, make different choices if we want a better and more just society. I’m quite aware that you deserve a better standard of life was the inspiration for quite a lot of revolutions, violent and nonviolent, in history. I regard that as a good thing, not a bad thing. Revolting social orders call for revolutions. In the strict sense there is no utopia on this earth, but there are some social orders that are certainly better than other ones, and plenty of those revolutions did actually ameliorate the problems that they set out to answer. Economic inequality in the former eastern bloc countries really was a lot lower than in their capitalist equivalents.

I would say that we need a lot less ‘acceptance’ of the fact that some people are rich and other people are poor, and a lot more anger about it.

There doesn’t have to have been an ‘evolutionary leap’ on the boats at all. The syllogism “19th and early 20th century eugenicists though Ashkenazi Jews were genetically crippled, modern day eugenicists think they are genetically gifted (in the intellectual sense), therefore claims about heritability of IQ are dumb because they are inconsistent over time” doesn’t actually work. We actually can have much more confidence in what we believe about heritability today than in what the early 20th century people believed, for several reasons. Firstly, environments are more similar today (i.e. extreme poverty is uncommon in Europe, basic welfare states allow everyone at least a minimum standard of living, and Jews in Europe are no longer fiercely oppressed), and when you reduce environmental variation more of the difference in outcome will reflect genetics. Secondly, our understanding of psychology, neuroscience and statistics is actually a lot better than it was in, say, 1914.

The problem faced by workers in Appalachia is the same as the one faced by those throughout Europe and increasingly East Asia in the past: that their regions, mountainous and cool, have inherent comparative disadvantages in that most stable sector – which is also the very sector which their only natural resource utilises. That sector being of course agriculture, and that resource soils of a fertility which the paleopedological record (check out Soils of the Past: an Introduction to Paleopedology) shows to be exceedingly rare or even unknown over most of geological time.

Consequently, the fate of Europe and East Asia most especially has been economic competition of a type utterly unconducive to stable family life – one where both partners must work and when gaining employment requires an education that eats out at a women’s prime reproductive years. The result, of course, is lowest-low fertility (below 1.3 children per woman), and rapid secularisation and resultant extremes of selfishness.

Even if underlying violence (just look at heavy metal lyrics and consider how metal music is predominant in the culture of say Scandinavia) can be totally eliminated on the surface by an efficient government, how long a system of public welfare that fails to create the taxes needed can be sustained has been an uncertain problem for many decades.

The alternative of cutting back to a minarchist state – as advocated by the Austrian School led today by the likes of Thomas Woods and Robert Patrick Murphy – is politically implausible in the worst-affected nations and whether it would improve their economy is uncertain. The problem for Europe, East Asia, and increasingly the Americas is countering their irrelevance in the modern high-technology age where critical resources are largely held by Australia, Africa and the Middle East.

This review reminded me of Springsteen’s ‘Johnny 99.’ Ralph loses his job, can’t find another and responds by getting drunk and shooting a night clerk, only to be arrested in front of a strip club. The song’s plaintive lyrics about Ralph (‘Johnny 99’) telling the judge that there’s a lot behind what ‘put that gun in my hand’ reveals the same lack of agency that the author describes. It is hard to sympathize with willful self-destruction practiced as a lifestyle, yet that is the reality of rural America.
Only a religious revival can alter the downward trajectory. If England needed the Wesleys to avoid the fate of France, then we also stand in need of the same spirit of revival to avoid our own descent into tyranny and terror.

Excellent post, I do have a comment though, and it’s a long one, so bear with me a little. Let’s make a two-stop tour in history. After WWII, many people faced a puzzle: how did so many Germans do so many terrible things? Are they evil? Perhaps this question was one of the origins of social psychology, which offered an answer: no they weren’t; you just need a small fraction of “evils” and some structural conditions to make a lot of people do crazy things. Now, let’s go to 1860s America, and remember how amiable Lincoln’s attitude was towards the Southerners even though he believed their views to be both morally wrong and logically flawed. Yet he understood why and how they felt, and for many months even through the war, he was advocating compensated emancipation despite the arguments of ardent radical republicans. He could have said, as did many republicans, from the beginning: do the right thing or go to hell! He didn’t, not only his possession of “the elements of greatness, combined with goodness,” but also his profound ability to understand why someone may do something or feel in some way. But I get a feeling that some of us think more like this: my dear hillbilly, look…you’re backward, lazy, ignorant, irresponsible, and idiot, and that’s why you’re miserable. You gotta change your views and attitude. Just zoo it! These statements may or may not be accurate, but they are tantamount to telling a deeply depressed person: hey, come on, get out of the bed and go do exercise and eat your breakfast…just be happy!

Sure, let’s agree that culture plays a key role in that region or many regions of the world. But what is culture? A set of beliefs, social norms, rituals, ways to do things, etc., and when see a person holding certain unreasonable views and conforming to destructive some social norms, two questions seem particularly relevant: why they believe what they believe? And, how can we changes their beliefs and norms? Surely, people understand that if they have only a 100 dollars and spend it on alcohol, or drugs, or a ring, or even donate it to save some people in Ukraine, then they will not be able to buy news cloths for your kids or take them out to have fun! If they didn’t the first time, surely they get it by the fifth time around. If they don’t, would it be helpful to have a billboard right across from their window to remind them? Or, send someone every morning to knock on their door to remind them? If you believe it would, then great. If you don’t, then the question is then what is the remedy or remedies? Maybe two key very basic elements for “success”, however you want to define it, are resilience and the ability to accept help: I try to learn something or do something, but I fail once, I fail twice, but I don’t quit until I succeed, and I try to get others help, at least won’t refuse it as a matter of pride. If so, where one can learn these very fundamental traits given that one’s parent(s) can barely take care of his/her basic needs. Maybe school? Maybe some devoted teachers? I can’t think of anywhere else unless one is lucky and have good grandparent or maybe a good neighbor or church community, but these are rare. But if the key are the school teachers, then who can design a system that brings such teachers to such regions but the government. Being one of the most basics of public goods right next to defense and security, providing teachers that can break such cultural cycle (if you wish) is squarely the responsibility of the government. And, if that doesn’t work, then I don’t know how such a culture with its views of how the world functions and its social norms that ruins one’s can spontaneously change.

What conservative, libertarian, capitalist, etc doesn’t love to victim blame while removing all accountability from the economic policies they favor? Guess who else likes your views? SJW’s, feminists,etc because it validates their views of whites.